May 11, 2018
Well, we finally have the spring weather and that lets us know that we are getting close to the end of our year!! After so much excitement last week with our field trip and Derby Day, we have settled back down to work here in 1P.
Math
In Math this week, we have continued to work on story problems, or word problems as they were traditionally called. We are working on finding the important information in a story problem and knowing the information that we can disregard. We have learned how to pull out the important words that let us know what operation we are using (addition or subtraction) and what kind of problem we have to solve (one answer or many answers, missing number, etc). We continue to practice all that we need when recording an answer to a story problem on paper - 1.) an equation - 5+3=8; 2.)a strategy - 5 -count on 3 - 6,7,8 or I know 4+4=8, so take one from one of the fours and add to the other 4, so 5+3=8; 3.) answer - circle 8 and 4.) label (this one is forgotten the most!!!) - are we talking about buttons, balls or steps - be sure to add the label to your answer!
Reading
1P loves to read - I often hear groans when I ring the bell to end Reader's Workshop - that is such music to my ears!! At this point, we are all motivated to read, read, read which is what helps us to become even better readers. All of the kids are pretty good at choosing good books that are at their reading level and we continue to practice our reading strategies to help us with unknown words. A few of us do still need reminders to use strategies and not to guess when we get stuck. We are all working on reading fluency now - how to read aloud with a voice (sometimes we call it teacher voice - how the teacher reads books aloud) that sounds like it flows and remembering to read the punctuation too (so a questions sounds like a question and we stop at end marks, etc.). The other concept we are working on is retelling - an important piece for comprehension, which is the area that all of us need work on. We are working on character information and how we know more about a character than just what is told in the story.
Writing
In Writer's Workshop, May is the month for Poetry. We started off our Poetry unit, reading rhyming stories, for example, Dr. Seuss books that read like poetry. We also read examples of rhyming poetry. We then began to experiment with our own rhyming poems and how to write about our preferred topics and find rhyming words that fit. Then we read more poetry and talked about how we are able to close our eyes and see a picture in our minds by reading the poem. We experimented with this using our senses to write the poems. Choose a topic -what would you see, hear, feel, smell and taste? We talked about using descriptive words in our poems.
Science
We have been working on our Physical Science topic Behavior of Light. After conducting experiments to compare things that are - Transparent -let all light pass through, Translucent - let some light pass through, and Opaque - let no light pass through. Then we used flashlights and Mirrors to experiment with reflection and how light changes direction.
Mrs. P :)
Mrs. P :)
